The network of an enterprise or organization is typically organized in a centralized way, which means that one unit is responsible for the maintenance and administration of the enterprise's or organization's network while all other units or departments are able to use the network resources. Information technology has become more and more important as a way of doing business while the complexity of network environments has increased. Due to the increase in complexity, the costs of maintaining, upgrading, and administrating network environments has also increased.
The costs of the administration and maintenance of the network are typically shared between all units or all divisions of an enterprise or an organization. Today, there is however no commercial product available which can be employed to gather the network usage of all users of a network so that the corresponding departments or units of the users can be billed in accordance with the network usage of their users.
It is desirable to be able to do accounting so that the unit that maintains and administrates the network can act as a company's or organization's internal service provider. If it could be possible to determine the network usage of a department within a given period of time, for example each month, the costs could be allocated exactly to the corresponding cost centers.
There is therefore a need for an improved method and an improved data processing system for determining user specific network usage of a network according to which users or departments could be charged.